THE

GLOBAL SURVEY

ON

HUMAN VALUES

THE QUESTION

Adjust the slider to show how you'd split your country's finite resources between the military (weapons and armed forces) and clinical trials to cure and treat disease.

50%
Military & Weapons
50%
Clinical Trials

2 BILLION PEOPLE ARE

SUFFERING

FROM CURABLE DISEASES

FOR 2 REASONS:

REASON 1.

The Current System of Clinical Research Is Slow and Terrible

💰

82xX Higher Costs Than Necessary

Current clinical trial costs are 82x times higher than pragmatic trial alternatives.

👥

$41K Cost Per Participant

Traditional clinical trials cost $41K per participant, exceeding median annual income in many countries.

💸

$2.6B Development Cost

The average cost to develop a new drug is $2.6B, reflected in pharmaceutical pricing.

☠️

21K-120K Preventable Deaths

Regulatory delays contribute to an estimated 21,000-120,000 preventable deaths per decade.

🚫

86.1% of Patients Excluded

Current trial eligibility criteria exclude 86.1% of patients with the condition being studied.

💊

95% of Diseases Untreated

95% of known diseases lack FDA-approved treatments, with research concentrated on the remaining 5%.

🤒

14 Years of Suffering

The average time from discovery to widespread clinical adoption is 14 years.

⚛️

45.1B Untested Treatments

An estimated 45.1B potential treatment combinations remain untested with current methodologies.

🌍

2.4B People Suffering

Approximately 2.4B people worldwide suffer from diseases with inadequate treatment options.

🧫

44+ Years Since Last Disease Cure

No major disease has been cured in over 44 years, highlighting the need for new research paradigms.

HUMANITY SPENDS

40X MORE ON WAR

THAN CURING ALL DISEASES COMBINED

MILITARY
$2.72T
$2.72T FOR
MILITARY SYSTEMS
MEDICAL RESEARCH
$67.5B
$67.5B FOR
MEDICAL RESEARCH

WE CAN SOLVE BOTH OF THESE PROBLEMS SIMULTANEOUSLY

OXFORD RECOVERY TRIAL PROVED RESEARCH CAN BE DONE FOR

$500
PER PATIENT IN PRAGMATIC TRIALS
VS
$41K
PER PATIENT IN STANDARD TRIALS

Why The Bottleneck Is Clinical Trials, Not Basic Science

The Vast Unexplored Therapeutic Frontier

9.5K
Known Safe Compounds
FDA-approved drugs + GRAS substances already proven safe in humans
9.5M
Possible Combinations
9500 compounds × ~1,000 diseases
32.5K
Actually Tested
Approved uses + repurposed + failed trials
99.7%
OF DRUG-DISEASE COMBINATIONS NEVER TESTED
Only 0.34% of the therapeutic frontier has been explored. The treatments may already exist among known-safe compounds - we just haven't tested them.
Exploration Ratio=32.5K tested9.5M possible=0.34%\text{Exploration Ratio} = \frac{\text{32.5K tested}}{\text{9.5M possible}} = 0.34\%
Therapeutic Frontier Explored
TESTED (0.34%)
UNEXPLORED (99.7%)

That tiny line on the left? That's ALL of modern medicine.

You cannot have "diminishing returns" when you haven't even started.

Wait, it gets worse: The FULL therapeutic frontier

The 9.5M figure above only counts single drugs against diseases. Modern medicine increasingly uses combination therapies (standard in oncology, HIV, cardiology).

9.5M
Single Drugs × Diseases
What we showed above
45.1B
Drug Pairs × Diseases
Combination therapy space
42M
Emerging Modalities
Gene therapy, mRNA, cell therapy
45.1B
Total Therapeutic Frontier
That's 45.1B combinations we could test. We've tested about 32.5K. Do the math on "diminishing returns."

Note: We use the conservative 9.5M figure in our main calculations because single-drug trials are more straightforward. But the combination therapy space shows the true scale of unexplored medicine.

Years to Universal Treatment Coverage

The Core Problem
6,650
Diseases Without Effective Treatment
~15
First Treatments Discovered Per Year
At current clinical trial capacity
443
Years to Cover All Diseases
6,650 ÷ 15/yr
Status Quo

Clinical trials are how we discover which treatments work for which diseases. At current trial capacity, we find first effective treatments for only ~15 diseases per year.

443 Years
To find treatments for all 6,650 diseases
That's longer than recorded human history
222 Years
Average wait for any single disease
If you have an untreated disease, you'll likely wait ~222 years for a first effective treatment
With $27.2B/yr Pragmatic Trials

Pragmatic trials cost ~44× less than traditional trials. This funding enables 12× more trials = ~180 first treatments per year.

36 Years
To cover all 6,650 diseases
443 years ÷ 12× capacity = 36 years
Addressing the "Diminishing Returns" Argument

Critics argue: "Just funding more trials won't proportionally increase discoveries - we've picked the low-hanging fruit."

This is wrong for six reasons:

1.
We haven't picked the fruit at all.
99.7% of drug-disease combinations are unexplored. You can't have diminishing returns when you haven't started.
2.
The bottleneck is trials, not candidates.
9.5K safe compounds sit untested. The limiting factor isn't discovering molecules - it's the capacity to test them.
3.
40% of promising drugs die from COST, not science.
The "Valley of Death" kills 40% of promising candidates not because they don't work, but because testing is too expensive. That's not diminishing returns - that's artificial scarcity.
4.
When we DO test old drugs, 30% find new uses.
Drug repurposing has a 30% success rate - triple the 10% rate of new drug development. The low-hanging fruit is literally everywhere.
5.
The treatment gap is real and growing.
6,650 diseases have no treatment. At ~15 first treatments/year, we'll never catch up. With 12× more trials, we actually have a shot.
6.
More trials = compounding returns, not diminishing.
Every trial teaches us more about biology. More data → better target selection → higher success rates. AI/ML models trained on trial data improve predictions. The more we test, the better we get at testing.

Diminishing returns apply to repeated attempts at the same problem. We're proposing to attempt problems we've never tried.

Two Possible Futures

This timeline shows how soon we could find a first treatment for all 6,650 untreated diseases. Under the status quo (~15 new treatments/year), it takes 443 years. With increased pragmatic trial funding, we can accelerate discovery dramatically.

Make It Personal
Enter your age to see if treatments arrive on time
years old
You Are Here
Year 0 - Choose Your Destiny
🎉
Yay! Treatments for most diseases discovered
Due to increased trial capacity (37 years)
Now see unnecessary death & suffering on the status quo timeline below
🪦
YOU

Treatments exist. Safe compounds exist. Patients are waiting.

The missing ingredient is trial capacity. That's a logistics problem, not a scientific frontier.

THE QUESTION

Adjust the slider to show how you'd split your country's finite resources between the military (weapons and armed forces) and clinical trials to cure and treat disease.

50%
Military & Weapons
50%
Clinical Trials

YOUR VOTE'S IMPACT

38.4
LIVES SAVED PER VOTE

$27.2B/year scales trial capacity 12X, achieving 246 years of progress in 20

Through a 212-year average timeline shift: 12× trial capacity + eliminating 8.2-year regulatory delays

787
YEARS SUFFERING PREVENTED
$302.8M
ECONOMIC VALUE
30s
TO VOTE

Highest ROI Action in History

In 30 seconds, you can save more lives than most people save in a lifetime.